The QBIC project in the Department of Art and Art History at UC Davis

Abstract

The Art and Art History Department at the University of California at Davis is testing QBIC™ (Query By Image Content, image query software from IBM) as a tool for managing and retrieving images from on-line collections of digitized artwork. We have created two QBIC image databases. One is a website linked to the department's home page that allows students and the public access to images of artists who are teaching in the department at Davis, and the other is a non-web version that allows students access to a database of art images from an X-terminal in the Art Department Library. Art images are often difficult to describe precisely in words, a limitation addressed by QBIC's ability to perform searches based on how an image looks. The user can perform queries based on example images. A thumbnail image is displayed, and the system can search for other images with similar color, texture or overall layout The user can also use graphical tools to specify arbitrary characteristics such as a color histogram: 20% of a specific shade of blue, 30% of a shade of green. The search will return results in the form of thumbnail images arranged in descending order of match to the user's query. Text attributes such as the artist's name or media can also be used to restrict the search. The web version of QBIC continues research funded by IBM that began in 1993 when the department began testing QBIC on a pilot database of art images from the department's heavily used slide library.